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X-IO Announces ISE 900 Series G4

X-IO Technologies recently announced the ISE 900 Series G4. I had the chance to speak to Bill Miller about it and thought I’d provide some coverage of the announcement here. If you’re unfamiliar with X-IO, ISE stands for Intelligent Storage Elements. This is X-IO Technologies’ “next-generation ISE”, and X-IO will also be continuing to support their disk-based and hybrid arrays. They will, however, be discontinuing the 800 series AFAs.

What’s In The Box?

There are two boxes – the ISE 920 and ISE 960. You get all of the features of ISE hardware and software, such as:

High Availability

QoS

Encryption (at rest)

Management REST API

Simple Web-based Management

Monitored Telemetry

Predictive Analytics

They used to use sealed “DataPacs” in the disk drive days but this isn’t needed in the all-flash world. ISE still manages SSDs in groups of 10 and still overprovisions capacity up to a point. The individual drives are now hot-swappable though.

You also get features such as “Performance-Optimized Deduplication”, and deduplication can be disabled by volume.

Failed drives do not have the same urgency for replacement as traditional arrays

Web-based Management Interface

Simplified management with X-IO’s OptimISE

Support for multi-system management through a single session

At-a-glance and in-depth performance metrics

Customizable widget based layout

As with most modern storage arrays, the user interface is clean and simple to navigate. OptimISE replaces ISE Manager, although you’ll still need it to manage your Gen1 – Gen3 arrays. X-IO are considering adding support for Gen3 arrays to OptimISE, but they’re waiting to see whether there’s customer demand.

[image courtesy of X-IO Technologies]

X-IO tell me that snapshots and replication are on the roadmap and will be added in the future, with X-IO aiming to have these features available in H1 next year (but don’t hold them to that though). They’ll also be aiming to add support for iglu systems.

Show Me Your Specs

It wouldn’t be a product announcement without a box shot.

[image courtesy of X-IO Technologies]

2U Dual-Controller Active/Active

8Gbps FC (16Gbps field upgradeable in the future)

4 ports per controller (8 ports will be field upgradeable in the future)

Hot-Swappable FRUs

Controller

Power Supplies

Fans

Regulators

SSDs min – max

ISE 920: 10 – 20

ISE 960: 10 – 60

Two hot-swappable 1600 Watt PSUs

Capacity (*Effective capacity assumes 5:1 deduplication ratio)

ISE 920: 9.6TB – 242TB

ISE 960: 9.6TB – 725TB

Capacity expansion (up to 60 drives) is done in 10 drive increments.

Performance

X-IO tell me they can get performance along the lines of:

Up to 400,000 IOPS; and

Access Time <1ms.

Conclusion and Further Reading

X-IO released a really good overview of the Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) platform a while ago that I think is worth checking out. X-IO’s deduplication solution promises to deliver some pretty decent results at a highly efficient clip. If you want some insight into how they go about doing it, check out Richard Lary’s presentation from Storage Field Day 13. This is their first array with deduplication built in, and I’m interested to see how it performs in the field. The goal is to deliver the same results as their competitors, but with improved efficiency. This seems to be the goal behind much of the hardware design, with X-IO telling me that they come in around 60 cents (US) per effective GB of capacity. That seems mighty efficient.

X-IO have been around for a while, and I’ve found their Axellio Edge product to be fascinating. The AFA market is crowded with vendors saying that they do all things for all people. It’s nice to see that X-IO aren’t promising the world to customers, but they are offering some decent features at a compelling price.

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disclaimer

The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by my employer and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of my employers, previous or current. This is my blog.

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